I'm going to love using this. I write for a living, so I write a maddening volume of output per week. While I don't absolve myself of the need to edit everything, I'm working against the law of large numbers. Some stupid errors, or bad stylistic habits, are going to slip through the net every week.
I've been jonesing for a real-time style editor for years. Autocorrect is fine and dandy (and often wrong, but that's another story). But most autocorrect systems limit themselves to spelling and grammar. Hemingway selects for readability. That's very cool and very useful.
That said, I'm probably not going to copy & paste everything I write into the Hemingway editing environment. I'd love plug-ins and APIs for Word, Google Docs, etc. If you make these, I will use them, and I will bug the living shit out of every writer I know to do the same.
One my biggest problems is word repetition sentence to sentence. I have been mulling an NLTK powered editor for quite awhile now and this PoC is exciting.
> One my biggest problems is word repetition sentence to sentence.
It would be nice to have a tool that detects such things, but for the moment, a detailed editing pass is a good idea. I always edit what I write, indeed most of the time I'm writing and editing in parallel.
> But I want to much more!
I'm more than a little worried that, because of AI advances, automated methods will finally (and undesirably) hide the "voice" of the text's originator.
> I'm more than a little worried that, because of AI advances, automated methods will finally (and undesirably) hide the "voice" of the text's originator.
But for a lot of writing this is a good thing, having cohesive writing trumps losing the voice. It isn't fiction that I think these tools will be useful or desirable for, it is the mountains of technical writing we are drowning in.
More troubling is the use of automated writing tools for propaganda and psyops.
Agreed. We could point out that, for the last 30-odd years, Strunk and White's "Elements of Style" has served as the homogenizing cudgel used to beat every writer's voice into submission. But, by and large, the influence of EoS has been a good thing. It's helped a lot more people than it's hurt.
Serious and professional writers generally write for two things: clarity and insight. Stylistic preferences shouldn't stamp out a writer's ability to make a good point. They should help him express that point more clearly. That's usually to the writer's (and readers') advantage.
Writers who break the rules, and who know what they're doing, are fine. Most rule-breakers don't know what they're doing, however. For every David Foster Wallace, there are a thousand writers who aren't aware they're hard for most people to read.
I've been jonesing for a real-time style editor for years. Autocorrect is fine and dandy (and often wrong, but that's another story). But most autocorrect systems limit themselves to spelling and grammar. Hemingway selects for readability. That's very cool and very useful.
That said, I'm probably not going to copy & paste everything I write into the Hemingway editing environment. I'd love plug-ins and APIs for Word, Google Docs, etc. If you make these, I will use them, and I will bug the living shit out of every writer I know to do the same.